The 5 Jones: Driving Through Texas

Putting suitcases on the roof

Today's post is called, "Driving Through Texas," because that's pretty much what we did today. We drove, and drove and drove.... From Fredericksburg to Canyon. We made it right at 8 hours with a short fast food stop for lunch and a couple of bathroom/gas stops.

The morning started off great. A couple in the breakfast room at the motel complimented my mom and I on how well behaved our group of five was at breakfast. That was really nice, cause you usually only get the evil eye when one is acting up. We made sure to tell the kids how proud we were of their behavior to start the day.

Last night, Dad made a run over to Wal-Mart and purchased a luggage bag thing to move a couple suitcases on top of the car to free up a little space inside the car. We barely struggled at all getting the two largest bags up there and secured. But let me say a word about giving your son the camera to grab a few shots of our efforts. 7 year old boys don't think too much about what they are taking a picture of exactly, especially as it pertains to women. Let's just say, I ended up with 10-15 shots of my rear end as I stood on the car's bumper helping my dad. Daniel and I had a nice conversation about not taking pictures of Mommy's bottom.

The next eight hours are kinda a blur. The kids were relatively good in the car. Just the usual for five kids in a car for eight hours; really nothing terrible.

Even though I've lived in Texas for more than 30 years of my life, I don't think I've even been to the panhandle, including Abilene and Lubbock. Huh. They were really uneventful and flat. We barely saw the buildings of Texas Tech over the trees and other buildings as we sped by on the freeway.

We were amazed at the number of windmill farms along the highway out here. It was the same the last two years in West Texas on that road trip. Hundreds and hundreds of windmills producing electricity for the power grid. They are absolutely huge!

We arrived in Canyon (south of Amarillo) in time to head over to Palo Duro Canyon State Park for dinner and a musical theater performance of the play, Texas! On our way into the state park at 6 p.m. I tried to get a picture of the temperature gauge at the ranger station showing a whopping 108 degrees, but Dad wouldn't slow down enough for all my picture taking. Did I mention that this theater production is outside? Yee Haw, it was hot!

Driving into the canyon

Palo Duro Canyon is the second largest canyon in North America (second of course to the Grand Canyon). It is 120 miles long, 20 miles wide and over 800 feet deep. Basically, it is a deep gorge of green and orange sitting in the middle of flat prairie desert land. (It might be desert because of the drought, I'm not sure). We will explore it more tomorrow, but I got a few pictures as we came down into the canyon tonight.

For the last 46 years, there has been a musical stage production of the play, "Texas" produced at the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon in the summers. Even though it was really hot, it was a great show. Completely worth attending if you are in the panhandle region. It was big and showy and about early Texans settling the panhandle. Lots of big Texas pride on display in that outdoor theater. With the canyon walls as a backdrop they told a story of stubborn, hard-working, singing and dancing Texans filled with love for the Lone Star State. The kids had a great time, even staying awake until the big finale at 10:45 p.m. There were lots of special effects in the show, even artificial lightening coming down and striking a tree splitting it in half. Awesome! They kept us all on our toes into between the singing and dancing numbers.

Going into the Texas show!

Because it is not actually today anymore, but tomorrow, I'll just leave you with some of our favorite pictures from "today". In the morning, we tour the canyon some more and maybe visit a couple of museum here and in Amarillo before trekking on into Colorado for the night.